Harry, I accept you general summation of the problem but you have mischaracterised my position. This is because of a slight imprecision of my own. I agree with Oppenheimer et al's position (or rather they agree with mine since I was first in the field) that "a Germanic language" was spoken in Britain before the Romans arrived.

They hold that position because of the genetic resmblance between the British population and the German one. I hold it because I belive that English was that language and that English is sufficiently close to German that their respective speakers would be genetically close too.

My opposition to English being categorised as a "Germanic" language is a cladistic one. I do not disagree that they belong to the same family.

So there are only two possible positions. The choice, in your words, is between

<<1.The native language, Brythonic, did survive in many parts but the parents attempted to teach their children the language of the new elite at home. They did this badly so the children learned german but spoken as a celtic speaker. This is called a substrate effect.

2.the speedy transition never actually took place >>

I take it, from your somewhat uneasy wording in (1), that you are tending to the second position.

<<How many millions of 'Celts' do you think were living in the areas affected by Saxons in the early Historic Period then Mr Harper... or is that an observational error on your part?>>

An interesting question which the Inertial Principle helps to solve. We know from classical sources that Britain was densely populated by the standards of the time. We also know from the world today what to expect from a country operating intensive if somewhat primitive cereal agriculture. The results for lowland Britain as a whole, when the Romans arrive, and this is agreed by the relevant specialists, would be something between two and five million people.

When we arrive at the period of the Domesday Book, a thousand years later, we see a very similar picture ie a country of intensive cereal agriculture and a population (most demographic specialists agree) of between two and five million.

Applied Epistemologists start from the position that things stayed pretty much the same at all times between these terminal points. We would adjust upwards and downwards for known historical events. For instance there was a Europe-wide plague in the sixth century so we would adjust downwards for the known effects of plague but since the worst known case of plague is the Black Death whose effects were made up in a few generations, we would not for this reason depart from the principle of inertia. The fact is, in the long haul, populations just don't change very much.

So the answer to BAJR's question is, "Between two and five millions." Now of course this is an astonishingly high number for a few boatloads of Anglo-Saxons either to kill off or to shovel into Wales or to persuade switching languages, so Orthodoxy strives with might and main to get their numbers down. Watch and learn.

The population of England at the time of Domesday has been tentatively estimated at between 1¼ and 2 million. However, these figures are much lower than the 4 million people there are estimated to have been in Roman times.

Estimates I am afraid.. but accurate estimates .. good grief.. we seem to be missing some people... I wonder where they went???

And remember the entire population is not 'converted as one' in a few years decades or even centuries.. it takes place piecemeal, over many many centuries... in some places, it still has not happened completely ..

A few boatloads?? you can use words to make it sound like 40 saxons are being talked about here... try thousands over time.. tens of thousands even. Your numbers are poor use of statistics...

At any one time - millions are not affected.. however over time (and a long time at that..) they are.. you are slippery .. I give you that... but still wrong.

quote:

I take it, from your somewhat uneasy wording in (1), that you are tending to the second position.

Good lord no MJH, I tend to think more in terms of a largely empty landscape in parts of Britain.

I see I did apparantly word (1) badly but I am quickly reiterating Hildegard Tristram's explanation. I simply wanted to introduce the other linguistic explantion for those who subscribe to the minimalist debate. Hence Frances Pryor's: "Why isn't english a celtic language? Well, in a way it is".

I am also open to the possibility that a third unknown language existed here and that this shared some of the germanic vocabulary. In other words, can these various ideas of Northwestblock, Old European and Folkish be extended beyond the low countries into the eastern parts of Britain? These ideas seem to be falling out of fashion thesedays however.

best

harry A

quote:

"Between two and five millions." Now of course this is an astonishingly high number for a few boatloads of Anglo-Saxons either to kill off or to shovel into Wales or to persuade switching languages, so Orthodoxy strives with might and main to get their numbers down.

MJ, you are now drawing on work produced by the same academics who you berated earlier.

Early anglo saxon archaeology in Elmet, an early british kingdom east of the pennines, amounts to little more than a few graves and a handful of beads. More recently, a couple of grübenhäuser have been added to the list. This is often cited as an example of the low number of Anglo Saxon settlers.

However, we also have precious little romano british archaeology in Elmet and since contemporary sources for the battle of Catterick further north give two numbers for the size of the British Army, 300 and 362, we have to wonder how many Britons there are around in the north. Härke estimates that the british population crashed from 3.9m to between 1 and 2 million before the arrival of the anglo saxons.

best

harry A

May I ask why this turgid debate is carrying on at all?

One side asserts

* ALL the scholarly research and discourse is tainted by the Original Sin of a faulty basic premise (paradigm);

* it is not by meticulous study of the scholarship that this is revealed, but by a common-sense evaluation of the assumption that English plainly descends from Anglo-Saxon;

* no amount of repeating the 200 years of thought, or even the latest findings, is logically capable of addressing the point.

And the other side counters by repeating the 200 years of thought and the latest findings!

---

"You are glossing over the evidence" has been cried out several times, but basic logical principles [and how much more scientific can you get?] have been avoided with a quick do-se-do.

One academic sweeping aside the details with

"The words you are reading are the most telling argument against the minimalist elite model. They are in English."

should have been a signal to the others to concentrate on the argument.

"Non-literate" is repeatedly misrepresented as illiterate.

The difference between "evidence" and "archaeological evidence" was missed; ditto the difference between Special Pleading and "different pleading".

The minute variations that demonstrate how little English has changed since the time of Chaucer are at the same time taken to illustrate how rapidly languages can change.

But, of course, that is not a sufficiently convoluted account; and anyway we know all about how unrecorded languages behave.

It doesn't take special schooling to see a logical flaw in that; or that the last person to trust to explain it away is someone with the special schooling.

---

Applied Epistemology claims to have the external perspective that is required: common sense and practical considerations of how people and languages actually go about things.

It's the professional historian/linguist/archaeologist's job to "go beyond common sense"; but it is also their job to work within their discipline, not to survey it's foundations.

Oh yes, another thing:

People said "we don't know what the language sounded like".

And then said "here is a website where you can listen to what the language sounded like".

<<The population of England at the time of Domesday has been tentatively estimated at between 1¼ and 2 million.>>

Remember, I said 'watch and learn'. I've no doubt that these figues 'have been tentatively estimated'. Much larger ones also have. This kind of 'selection-drift' is unavoidable when whoring after a given paradigm. (No doubt it applies to me as well.)

<<However, these figures are much lower than the 4 million people there are estimated to have been in Roman times.>>

An interesting Applied Epistemological point can be made here. History is severely demarcated by period, and one of those demarcations is between medieval and Classical. (Not to mention Iron Age). So it is is unlikely that the same people, or even the same school-of-people, are responsible for both the pre-Roman and the Domesday estimates. They will therefore be operating on different paradigms -- the former tending to boost the figure (to emphasise the importance of Iron Age Britain and the Coming of Rome) and the latter tending to diminish the figure (because of the need to have the Anglo-Saxon replacing the Celts).

I do not say that this accounts for the discrepancy but AE principles would demand that the point be addressed before such a revolutionary change be accepted as fact.

<<Hence Frances Pryor's: "Why isn't english a celtic language? Well, in a way it is".>>

You'll have to explain this baffling remark. English contains just seven Celtic words (according to the linguists).

<<MJ, you are now drawing on work produced by the same academics who you berated earlier.>>

You quite mistake our methods, Harry. We rely on work produced by academics for everything we say. Good grief, do you suppose we actually get up off our chaise-longues and do field-work? We just differ with academics as to the conclusions reached.

quote:

People said "we don't know what the language sounded like".

And then said "here is a website where you can listen to what the language sounded like".

I think that was me Innocent.

The first part refers to the anglian language circa 45O AD. The second part refers to Chaucer circa 1350 AD. There is 900 years between, a considerable period in which the language can develop.

Of course, we don't really know what Chaucer's english sounded like, it is only a reconstruction. The assertion was however, that Chaucer's english is the same as modern english. That is only one view. The web site sample obviously takes a different view.

We do of course have anglo saxon speakers who will happily read passages in their own reconstructions, but we don't know if the written texts accurately reflect the spoken language.

Hence, "if tha seeas a yow rigwelted, tha mun upskittle it" is still spoken in the area where the Brontes were writing over 150 years ago. They however wrote a more recognisable form of english.

best

harry A

Again, what the language sounded like depends on your chosen paradigm. People who believe Chaucer is Middle English make it sound absurdly foreign. To give us our due we have tried to stick to the evidence by using Chaucer's own words to show how modern they are.

You're suffering a bit from Texas Syndrome, Harry, whenever you return to your Yorkshire roots. You're not quite as special as you like to think. I don't think you could produce a Yorkshire dialect/accent that I couldn't understand (mostly). In other words, everybody in Yorkshire is an English-speaker. If, even on your estimates, this English has been spoken for more than a thousand years, and Yorkshire is so special, isn't it a bid odd that the rest of us can still understand you all?

Either nothing has changed very much over all that time or Yorkshire isn't very special and has been rapidly changing its spoken language at the same rate and along very much the same lines as folk from Lancashire, Devon, London etc etc.

quote:

You'll have to explain this baffling remark. English contains just seven Celtic words (according to the linguists).

This is the cause of much of the suspicion you see here. They think you're up to the same tricks. We used to have celticists and anglo saxonists. Now, you introduce the englicist, which upsets the other two who were well rehearsed in the methods of dealing with each other.

The argument for a Celtic substrate within english is, as Innocent points out for other matters, not quantified. So some will say there are a lot of celtic substrate effects whilst others say, it is surprising that we do not see more.

Thus, in an attempt to quantify the number of celtic substrate effects, the celticists have started to write them down. In english by the way.

These substrate effects are supposed to be observable in dialects: For example:

We'll get a brick,
and chuck him up in the air,
and if he do come down,
we got to go to work,
and if he do stop up there,
he said,
"we got to have a day off.


"there was nothing for me to say" rather than "I had nothing to say"

Celticists claim that this goes back to celtic speaking mums talking english in a celtic way to their children.

Welsh doesn't have a single word for 'yes' as we do rather it has many ways of confirming the positive by affirming the original question. "are you walking to school?", "I am walking to school"

Apparantly, this is a dead giveaway. To celticists at least.

best

harry A

quote:

Either nothing has changed very much over all that time or Yorkshire isn't very special and has been rapidly changing its spoken language at the same rate and along very much the same lines as folk from Lancashire, Devon, London etc etc.

Sadly very much a case of the latter I'm afraid. Most of the population of Leeds wouldn't understand the bit about the ewe on its back but they do still use words like laikin, nobbut and throng. But, you're reet, they'll drink more latte than posset.

best

harry A

[To unintentionally echo what MJ Harper just said:]


If tha seeas a yow rigwelted, tha mun upskittle it

An ample illustration of how even a large amount of variation still leaves dialects of English grouped closer to each other than to any foreign language.

And this is the crux of the matter in The History of Britain Revealed. English and Anglo-Saxon can both be seen to have changed only a little over the course of centuries and to differ substantially from each other. They are on parallel paths, as it were, and should be seen as two separate languages.

Everyone thinks this makes interpreting historical evidence harder only because they have been trained to interpret historical evidence in a different way.

Of course, it is only the academic Establishment that is trained in this way, but then it also gets to claim to have the only authority to describe matters of Human Nature and language and probability and Real Life in the past...

Hey, BAJR, something for you here

Issue 10 of The Heroic Age (it's available free over the net)

The P-Celtic Place-Names of North-East England and South-East Scotland
by Bethany Fox

quote:

If tha seeas a yow rigwelted, tha mun upskittle it.

An ample illustration of how even a large amount of variation still leaves dialects of English grouped closer to each other than to any foreign language.

How?

Please explain, you were afterall complaining about soundbites rather than facts. How is this 'an ample illustration'?

best

harry A

quote:

If we are to accept this idea of a Germanic language in parts of what is now England, at a pre-Roman date shouldn't we expect to see a huge Vulgar Latin influence on English in the Early Medieval era?

The reference to Vulgar Latin is from the same stable as the Anglo-Saxon = Old English paradigm, so let's forget it for now.

Let us not forget, though, that the Roman Empire really was something special and brought all kinds of new things to these islands, so the Latin influence on provincial languages should be strong. {Note, incidentally, that Adam Hart-Davis said as much in What the Romans Did For Us... quite forgetting that the next chapter of the story has it that whatever influence the Romans had on the language of Britain was swept away by the adoption of Anglo-Saxon/Old English!}

Let us not forget, though, that large doses of the things the Empire had to offer came from other parts of the Empire and were as new to Romans as they were to us! Cf. all the products/practices/words in English resulting from the conquest of India.

So at best, shall we say Latin and the native language of Britain should have had a lot in common? And hey presto, according to figures already given, the Romanesque words suddenly appear in writing around the 14th century when demotic English itself appears in writing.

quote:

A fair point but by the same logic we would expect to see a huge Vulgar Latin influence on Welsh if that was the language spoken in what is now England. We don't.

A fair point. And if true, it rather speaks for the even more tendentious view [postulated in the History of Britain Revealed but not specifically advocated by the author] that the similarity between English and the Romance languages is better explained by their descent from English than by the Roman Imperial presence!

For all we know, all those Latin words in Welsh are English words.

---

Of course, they're only looking for a Celtic substrate [and the professionals, being clever an'all, are sure to find one] in the context of the transition from Celtic to Germanic. If there wasn't one, the conclusions, however well meaning, must be wrong. They will nevertheless be cited as good scientific work and advance the question of whether there was such a transition... well, not a jot actually.

quote:

Hey, BAJR, something for you here

Issue 10 of The Heroic Age (it's available free over the net)

That's very decent of you MJ. I didn't think Anglo saxons moving into P Celtic territory was your thing.

What's the twist?

best

harry A

quote:

The Heroic Age

Thanks... most interesting... seems to prove the model of Anglian advance and gradual replacement/inclusion of local/original inhabitants.

Though I did notice that she said
"Strikingly, apart from a single name at the mouth of the Forth (Tyninghame), " I happen to live in Whittingehame about 4 miles from Tyninghame but aprat from that..

quote:

It suggests that the most likely model for this advance is first spreading along the river valleys of the major rivers of the Tyne, Tees, Alne and Tweed, and over the plain of the East coast. It seems plausible that p-Celtic speech survived for longer in the upland areas of the Pennines, Cheviots, Moorfoots and Lammermuirs, surviving perhaps longest of all in the area to the north of these latter two upland areas, where archaeological evidence supports the idea of an independent British kingdom surviving for a time after the Anglicisation of the population further south.

Seems to show P-Celtic earlier than Anglian names.. so thats fine by me..

quote:

How is this 'an ample illustration'?

It's a bit unfamiliar, but's plainly English. Tha, seeas and yow are just alternative spellings for thou, sees and ewe chosen to reflect the dialect a (and make it look less Standard). Mun is a reasonably well known variation on must. Rig is the same as ruck, as in ruck sack, meaning back. I know from the beer what rigwelter means anyway, but it doesn't take long to confirm in the dictionary that weltering means rolling or floundering. Upskittle is not in my dictionary, but the image of putting a ewe back up on her pins comes readily to mind.

This is no easier or harder than reading Chaucer, high poetry, low prate or a technical paper... English may have many flavours, but they are all more "within reach" than any foreign language. Including Anglo-Saxon.

Using the dictionary in your own language is an entirely different process from using a foreign language dictionary.

quote:

These competing theories are all meant to explain the speedy transition that you ask about. However, they all do so in an attempt to persuade us that no mass migration took place. If you think a mass migration did take place, you have no need for any of these theories.

Not quite Harry.

Because if you ‘believe’ in a mass migration, all you get is an island full of Anglo-Saxon speakers. That solves only the problem of transforming a Celtic-speaking island into an Anglo-Saxon-speaking island, which is merely step one in your scenario. You’ve still to explain the transformation of Anglo-Saxon into English – and (to paraphrase Time Team), you’ve only got a couple of centuries to do it.

Now obviously, the most simple explanation conceivable for how England comes to be English-speaking is that it was always, more-or-less English Speaking. And scientific principles are very clear that the simple answer is always to be preferred except where it can be refuted. That means specific evidence is needed to demonstrate that the majority population was not speaking English at some given time in the past. Otherwise, we may not abandon that explanation for a more complex alternative.

What you need is a fact with which the simplest proposition is incompatible.

And to overthrow the simple explanation in favour of such a complex scenario as is conventionally advocated (Celtic into Anglo-Saxon by invasion; then Anglo-Saxon into English by evolution) you need quite convincing inconsistencies indeed. Extrordinary claims require extraordinary evidence after all.

It is our position that there exists no data-point with which the simplest scenario is incompatible. Therefore, we are bound to accept it.

Nevertheless, Harper demonstrates that the two mechanisms to which orthodoxy appeals to effect its double linguistic transformation are highly problematic and do not appear capable of doing the job asked of them. In no other case did an invasion of Britain effect a full transformation of the language. And the rapid evolution of Anglo-Saxon into English is not supported by direct observation of the rate of change subsequently evident in English.

That is a very powerful argument.

quote:

Ebrauc => Eboracum => Eoforwic => Jorvik => York

Comparing modern day York in England with modern day Jork in Germany would be useless.

If this is meant to illustrate the natural, continual evolution of place names, uncovered with more or less effort for us by place name scholars (at once underpinning and corroborating their work)... then I find it rather misleading.

Taking the Latinised and de-Latinised and contemporaneous Eboracum and Ebrauc as one, the overview of the entire recorded history of the name of York goes about like this:

Eboracum/Ebrauc
Eboracum/Ebrauc
Eboracum/Ebrauc
Eboracum/Ebrauc
Eboracum/Ebrauc
Eoforwic
Eoforwic
Eoforwic
Eoforwic
Jorvik
York
York
York
York
York
York
York
York
York
York

Is that continual evolution or 4 discrete changes of name with 4 discrete changes of administration in this important town?

Ebrauc, Eboracum and Eoforwic look like Celtic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon renditions of some basic name like Eber/Efer/Ever. What language is that? No idea.

[Remember: when place name scholars say "could be this, could be that" they mean "actually, we don't know". I personally can not hear whether the person saying so has a diploma on their wall or not.]

York and Jorvik could certainly be versions of each other -- though that implies the V is to be pronounced more like a U or W, contrary to the telly ads for the Viking Centre -- but what language is that? No idea.

More importantly, what is the connection between Eber/Efer/Ever and Yor/Jor? We can presume there must have been some tongue-twisting going on... or we can say "for all we can tell, these are 2 different names... for all we can tell, the Vikings introduced a new name... but for all we can tell, the Vikings used the original name, as still used by the locals irrespective of the shenanigans with previous generations of rulers. And for all we know, Jork in Germany harks back to the same root."